


darling would you mind giving my reflection a break

by principessa



Series: all you have is an axe to grind [5]
Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age II
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Chasind Hawke, Family Feels, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Introspection, Past Character Death, Red Hawke, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-01
Updated: 2018-02-01
Packaged: 2019-03-12 09:44:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,651
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13544754
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/principessa/pseuds/principessa
Summary: "Some days, none of the Hawkes can bear to look at one another, seeing ghosts of the dead in each other’s faces."Hawke family values. Set between the Prologue and Act 1.





	darling would you mind giving my reflection a break

**Author's Note:**

> lmao you thought i was done with this

Some days, none of the Hawkes can bear to look at one another, seeing ghosts of the dead in each other’s faces. Bethany shies away from mirrors anyway, mourning a twin where Hawke and Mother mourn brother and son respectively – the pain is more personal for her, written down in the very bones of her: _what was once half your soul is now gone._ She cries at night, when she thinks they can’t hear her. Mother does it too, and Hawke would think that would be enough of a reason to hold Bethany back – surely, she knows how it hurts to hear it happen, why would she turn around and do the same to them? Maybe they’re both hoping that one of the remaining two will say something, go to them and hold them and wipe their tears.

Unfortunately for the lot of them, Hawke women do not great comforters make, and Uncle Gamlen isn’t even worth a mention.

It’s both for the better and the worse, this uncle being a figure in their lives, no matter how useless Hawke finds such trains of thought. Gamlen never knew Carver, has nothing to compare the Hawke family unit to: he never knew Bethany-and-Carver or Hawke-and-Carver or Mother-and-Carver, so he doesn’t see how all of them are lacking for his absence, more than they ever suffered for Father being gone, except perhaps Mother, who was the only way who loved him truly and truthfully to the end and beyond. But he also doesn’t have patience for it, in a way that Hawke can sympathise with. She’s tired of hearing them cry and quiver, too, but she still threatens to break his face in when he calls her sister a whiny bitch – it’s the principle of the thing. And so the days go on and on. Bethany avoids mirrors. Mother avoids looking either of them in the face for too long and doesn’t look Hawke in the eyes ever. Gamlen yells at them all for being nervous, and Bethany snaps back, and Mother tries to shout over both of them and Hawke invariably ends up either threatening someone or sweeping out of the room to sharpen her sword on the doorstep until she calms down and can come back without breaking something or someone’s nose.

“I hate it here,” Bethany says to her bitterly one morning, every morning, at the market, during drills, on missions for Meeran, in her sleep.

“I know,” Hawke replies, and “Hush,” or “No use in that now,” or “Me too,” or “Complaining won’t do anything.” She knows that her sister wishes she were softer, and even she wishes she could be kind at times, wishes she knew how to handle Bethany’s fragile feelings, her sister made of glass with an inferno inside waiting to burst out, held back by meekness and education. But Hawke had the same father as she did, had the same mother – she doesn’t know where Beth wants her to have _learned_ this miraculous delicacy, when she was born ready to be moulded and then turned harsh and rough and sharp, a soldier of a daughter even before she swore fealty to her king.

There was a time, before – when it was just her and Mother and Father, when she remembers he would sing much more often, and Mother would play the fiddle, and he would pick Hawke up and swing her around. _“Little Masha with eyes like coal,”_ and he would hold her upside down or tickle her stomach. _“You’ll be the fiercest warrior to grace the earth, won’t you?”_ When she broke a cup or plate he’d laugh his brief-exhale-chuckle that meant he was nearly in tears of mirth, _“We’ve raised a berserker, Leandra.”_ She’d been her father’s child in every way, with his eyes and hair and beak-like nose, his fascination for the spirits of the world, his love for his culture, his disdain for her mother’s. Mother would sometimes look at her and say _“You’re his daughter through and through, girl. All I did was carry you, Maria,”_ and she’d never meant it harshly: merely as truth. It was why she loved the twins so fiercely, why she raised them in her Maker’s light, filling their heads with nonsense and teaching them to fear: they would be hers, named after her family, raised with her childhood in mind. Bethany with her little lady manners, as opposed to Hawke, who held herself like the barbarian people accused her of being. As if Hawke didn’t love the twins more than herself; as if she wasn’t taught to. As if she didn’t have to become the caretaker, the defender, the instant the twins were born – the instant they knew Mother was with child. As if _Masha_ didn’t fade away like a memory, never to be heard again as soon as Bethany came into the world bawling and Carver followed meekly – the only time he was ever fucking quiet, Hawke sometimes thought, when she still thought of Carver, before she locked him away behind iron doors in her mind, put him away to never be seen again. Before she left his cracked and mangled corpse in still-warm blood, before she scolded Bethany for even taking the time to give him a pyre.

( _Get them to safety, get them to safety,_ instilled into the very bones of her, carved onto the inside of her ribs, tainting her blood like so much ancient magic. _Leave the dead behind and carry the living, girl. Blood doesn’t abandon blood, girl._ She still hasn’t been forgiven for that, and she knows she never will be, but she doesn’t care – she’s carried enough burdens to spare her family’s shoulders, her own made wide by years of labour and farm-work and swordsmanship. This is but one more.)

Mother can’t look at Bethany for seeing Carver and can’t look at Hawke for seeing Malcolm, and Bethany can’t look at herself, and Hawke can’t look at anyone without seeing red, unable to process any of it, unable to bear the emotionality, the vulnerability. She goes outside and tends her weapons, goes and kills and breaks legs for Meeran, goes and works the docks when Gamlen finds her work. It’s what she does, all she can do. Earn money for them and feed them and watch out for them.

She sees Bethany struggling with her hair in her face during battles; “You should cut it all off,” goes over as well as is to be expected – it’s one of a handful of times Hawke has ever seen Bethany lose control of her magic, and Hawke’s sleeping roll on the floor is frozen through the entire night for it. She hadn’t even been thinking of Carver when she said it. Still, Hawke suffers through Mother’s lessons in braiding hair her way, and every morning thereafter she stands behind Bethany and ties her hair back in twin Orlesian plaits while Bethany blearily sips at weak under-steeped tea.

“Thanks, sis,” she pipes every morning, to which Hawke usually responds with some variation of “It’s nothing,” or else “It’s a pain in the ass,” on those mornings she feels feisty: “My braids keep for a month,” she teases, the closest she’s come to their old camaraderie since arriving in Kirkwall. The sisters Hawke have mostly dealt in silences and shared looks and futile attempts to force the other to eat more, in recent times.

“I think you look lovely, Bethany,” Mother tuts, and Hawke rolls her eyes into her own tea, takes only a bite of bread before they’re out the door, the better to spare more for the others. They all understood this tactic very early on but have since learned not to mention it. Hawke prefers it that way. She doesn’t want her emotions analysed, especially not by Gamlen.

She doesn’t bring up the tattoos again, not after that one conversation. She thinks of her brother who followed her to war, who sat in the firelight the eve of battle and demanded his kind written on his face in blood and ink. _“I’m not doing it for him, but for me,”_ he’d said, looking her dead in the eye, the last person to do so without flinching, the last person to see her and her ghosts and challenge them to a staring contest. _“This is who I am. He doesn’t get to ruin it.”_

He died with his ribs broken open to the frozen air, his face nearly collapsed, their matching Chasind markings proud and red and raw on what was left of his cheeks and forehead, the bridge of his crushed nose. She thinks that he’s ruined it for Bethany, now, but she doesn’t say it, never will. She doesn’t think of his name. _Leave the dead behind. Carry the living._ Hawke traces the shapes in her reflection, thinks of her mother shouting at her that she was the eldest, she should have died in his place, and how dare she patronise her, when she’d failed to protect the only people left. It’s nothing she’d never heard before, out loud or in the relative safety of her own mind.

She ignores it. Forces herself to carry on, to bear the burdens across her wide shoulders. She looks Bethany in the eye, takes her chin in her hand and looks at her and sees her. Bethany-without-Carver. Bethany-whose-soul-is-half-dead. Bethany-who-is-still-alive, Bethany-who-is-not-broken, Bethany-she-will-not-let-die. _I see you,_ she thinks, and she knows Bethany understands her – hopes Bethany understands her.

(“You need to work on your communication skills,” her little sister says into the dark one night, completely unprompted, and they both startle when Mother snorts, not even bothering to scold them for being awake.

“Bite your tongue,” Hawke replies, and she doesn’t think of the pointed absence of voices, doesn’t think of the dead, doesn’t think of the ghosts who live in their eyes and hair and the shape of their profiles.)

**Author's Note:**

> damn caroline back at it again with the malcolm hawke feels


End file.
